Machines Like Me

But I didn’t move immediately. In full electric light I was able to observe his expression, which barely shifted when he spoke. It was not an artificial face I saw, but the mask of a poker player. Without the lifeblood of a personality, he had little to express. He was running on some form of default program that would serve him until the downloads were complete. He had movements, phrases, routines that gave him a veneer of plausibility. Minimally, he knew what to do, but little else. Like a man with a shocking hangover.

I could admit it to myself now – I was fearful of him and reluctant to go closer. Also, I was absorbing the implications of his last word. Adam only had to behave as though he felt pain and I would be obliged to believe him, respond to him as if he did. Too difficult not to. Too starkly pitched against the drift of human sympathies. At the same time I couldn’t believe he was capable of being hurt, or of having feelings, or of any sentience at all. And yet I had asked him how he felt. His reply had been appropriate, and so too my offer to bring him clothes. And I believed none of it. I was playing a computer game. But a real game, as real as social life, the proof of which was my heart’s refusal to settle and the dryness in my mouth.

It was clear he would speak only when spoken to. Resisting the impulse to reassure him further, I went back into the bedroom and found him some clothes. He was a sturdy fellow, a couple of inches shorter than me, but I thought my stuff would fit him well enough. Trainers, socks, underwear, jeans and sweater. I stood in front of him and put the bundle into his hands. I wanted to watch him dress to see if his motor functions were as good as the literature had promised. Any three-year-old knows how hard it is to put socks on.

When I gave him my clothes I caught a faint scent from his upper torso and perhaps his legs too, of warmed oil, the pale, highly refined sort my father had used to lubricate the keys of his sax. Adam held the clothes in the crook of both arms, with his hands extended towards me. He didn’t flinch when I stooped and disengaged the power line. His tight, chiselled features showed nothing at all. A forklift truck approaching a pallet would have been as expressive. Then, I supposed, some logic gate or a network of them yielded and he whispered, ‘Thank you.’ These words were accompanied by an emphatic nod of the head. He sat down, rested the pile on the table, then took from the top the sweater. After a reflective pause he unfolded it, laid it flat, chest side down, threaded his right hand and arm through to the shoulder, then the left, and with a complicated muscular swaying shrug it was on him and he was tugging it down straight at the waist. The sweater, made of faded yellow fleece, bore in red letters the jokey slogan of a charity I once supported. ‘Dyslexics of the World Untie!’ He unboxed the socks and remained seated to pull them on. His movements were deft. No trace of hesitation, no problems with relative spatial calculation. He stood, held the boxer shorts low, stepped into them, pulled them up, stepped likewise into the jeans, zipped up the fly and secured the silver button at the waist in one continuous movement. He sat again, hooked his feet into the trainers and tied the laces in a double bow at a blurring speed that to some might have seemed inhuman. But I didn’t think it was. It was a triumph of engineering and software design: a celebration of human ingenuity.

I turned away from him to begin my preparations for dinner. Overhead, I heard Miranda cross the room, her steps muffled, as though barefoot. Preparing to take a shower, getting ready. For me. I pictured her still wet, in a dressing gown, opening her underwear drawer and wondering. Silk, yes. Peach? Fine. While the oven warmed, I set the ingredients out on the work surface. After a day of greedy trading, there’s nothing like cooking to bring one back into the world’s better side, its long history of catering to others. I looked over my shoulder. It was startling, the effect of the clothes. He sat there, elbows on the table like some old pal of mine, waiting for me to pour the first glass of the evening.

I called out to him, ‘I’m roasting a chicken with butter and tarragon.’ It was mischievous of me, knowing his plain diet of electrons.

Without pausing, and in the flattest of tones, he said, ‘They go well together. But it’s easy to burn the leaves when you’re browning the bird.’

Browning the bird? It was correct, I guessed, but it sounded odd.

‘What d’you advise?’

‘Cover the chicken with tinfoil. From the size of it I’d say seventy minutes at 180. Then brush the leaves off into the juice while you brown at the same temperature for fifteen minutes without the foil. Then pour the tarragon back on with the juices and melted butter.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Remember to let it stand under a cloth for ten minutes before you carve.’

‘I know about that.’

‘Sorry.’